Greetings from the south Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, where I am taking it easy following the 72-hour binge this weekend known as "The Grand Switchover of 2005." (Of course, you wouldn't even be reading this if you didn't know all about the Grand Switchover already, which is why I'm not going to go into it.) I'm still simply basking in the glow a bit of actually finishing it all, after six months of MovableType tutorials and sloppy paper sketches and CSS glitches that threatened to drive me crazy, and am mostly taking a moment today to simply enjoy the moment, and know that for the most part it's over. This has, however, naturally gotten me thinking recently about my life overall these days, so I thought I'd take a moment and ruminate on the subject while I was at it.

The last two years of my life have, without a doubt, been strange ones - probably the strangest and most stressful of the nearly eleven years I've been in Chicago altogether. I even acknowledged this about a year a half ago, how it felt like I was entering a "transition year" of my life, one where big changes were about to take place but only with me not knowing what they were going to be, how I was going to emerge from the process a different person than I was before, but not knowing what kind of person that was going to be.

Now that the transition is almost complete (the mental transition, that is), I can see with hindsight how it has manifested itself - namely, I've given up pursuing a career as a creative writer, and the mindset and lifestyle that comes with that profession, and am now pursuing a career as a business owner, and the new mindset and lifestyle that comes with that. And I can't remember now if I've ever really sat down and explained what went into this decision, really, and what I hope to accomplish with this new career goal that I can't as an artist.

Regular readers, of course, will remember how last year I celebrated my tenth anniversary of moving to Chicago, and how when I first moved here in 1994 I sat down and wrote out a little ten-year plan for myself, with the promise that I would do so again when this first plan expired. And for the process of really be of any benefit, I had to evaluate that first plan's success in just as harsh a sense of reality as possible, to really admit to myself all the successes and failures, all the strengths and weaknesses about me that became apparent during those ten years.

And I guess that was really the first moment I actually pinpointed what it was about my life that was causing me so much subconscious stress back then, and making me feel like I was entering a major transition in the first place - that even though I was extremely happy with what I had accomplished artistically, and very proud of all the projects I had written, I was still not even the tiniest bit close to securing any kind of stability in my life as an artist. And by 'stability' I mean a bunch of little things, most of which are connected in complex ways - the financial stability to pay all my bills, the stability to get a decent apartment and to fill it with decent furniture, the inability as a result to attract the type of woman I want to be dating at this point in my life (with her own career, her own head on her shoulders, ready for something serious in her romantic life). And when you really take a brutally honest look at where my career was at in 2004, it was obvious that this quest for stability wasn't going to get any easier, either - like most of my peers I couldn't get anyone in the mainstream media interested in publishing my work (which is no big problem), but unlike them I couldn't get cool, fiercely-independent small publishers interested in my work either (which is a much bigger problem, when you can't get the mainstream world's attention either).

This is the main reason I switched careers last year - because one day soon I'm going to have a particularly long sneeze, and by the time I finish sating "gesundheit" I'm going to be 40 years old without even realizing that it was approaching. And I don't want to be some 40-year-old unemployed artist, living in a studio apartment full of thrift-store furniture, unable to attract any women besides bipolar, psychotic little 26-year-old poets. I don't. My priorities really are profoundly and permanently shifting in my life, so that what's becoming of more importance to me than anything else is simply being able to pay my rent every month, being able to eat every day, being able to have people over to my place. And this is why I actually gave a lot of serious consideration to a whole host of possible new careers last summer, when I was first making this decision - as a full-time copywriter, a publishing executive, even a brief flirtation with the idea of starting my own corporate think-tank for those in electronic publishing. But ultimately, though, almost all of these still involved working for someone else, and putting myself in the same damn position that's been driving me so crazy all these years, of having some random schmuck in control of whether or not I have a job. Which is why ultimately I decided to open an arts center instead, so I could be my own boss and never have to worry about the subject of asshole supervisors again.

And it's all exciting, to be sure, and I've been getting the usual emails congratulating me on the decision and the usual emails predicting my imminent failure. But boy, let's make no mistake that it was one of the hardest decisions I've ever made. I mean, hey, I was 35 years old when I made the decision to completely change careers - and as anyone 35 or older can attest, it's fucking difficult to make that decision at 35 or older, no matter who you are. My actual career choice may have been unusual, but the pursuit of it was just like any other career pursuit - you log in experiences, you log in dues, you build on the successes that came before, to secure opportunities for bigger successes. I'd been pursuing a career as an artist full-time for 16 years at that point, and it was just as hard for me to turn my back on that as it would be for a marketing executive who had spent 16 years working in the marketing industry. That's a lot of time invested in a particular industry, a particular career - a lot of successes that took a long time to achieve, and more importantly, a lot of traditional achievements in my new career choice that I wasn't having in my twenties.

This is probably the most terrifying thing, in fact, about completely changing careers in your mid-thirties - that in terms of experience, education and peer respect, you've suddenly dropped to the level of a freshly-graduated 22-year-old again. And man, it's almost impossible for a 35-year-old to directly compete against a 22-year-old, when you start with the same level of experience and peer respect; that 22-year-old will work ten hours a day and not think twice about it, will defer to their asshole supervisor a lot more willingly than that slightly-pissed-off 35-year-old newbie, has so many less obligations to interfere with dedicating his life to that new day job of his. The salaries associated with the first four or five rungs of a typical industry perfectly match the needs of a younger person - someone in their twenties, for example, can roll with the slow raises and promotions and have it exactly match where in their personal life they are. Someone in their thirties, though, can't do the same, especially as they hit their forties and have their salary still be the level of some 29-year-old middle manager.

None of this is any different for me than it would be for any 35-year-old that's decided to jump into an entirely new, unrelated career; I worry just as much, for example, that I will forever be playing catch-up as a small-business owner, forever learning things for the first time that a 25-year-old MBA graduate takes for granted. The fact that my former career was an unusual one, with an unusual way of pursuing it, doesn't change the fact that I did pursue it like any other career, and that it's just as scary for me to jump to a new one at 35 as it would be for anyone else in that position.

There are certain positive facts, however, that are simply impossible to avoid about the career jump - I'm a much happier person than I was a year and a half ago, much more focused, much more under the belief that my life is moving in a forward direction, that I am accomplishing things right now that will eventually matter quite a bit in this new career I've decided to pursue. And I guess most importantly, I have this quiet, solid confidence in my business plan, like that unspoken comfort of slipping into your favorite piece of clothing, the one that for some irrational reason makes you feel like an unstoppable badass when you wear it. I've always been smart enough to come up with unusual ideas that somehow work; it's just that now, for the first time, I'm developing the mature and complex mindset that comes with a big-budget project of this kind, and growing into the physical age that makes others automatically give your ideas more respect, no matter how ridiculous it is that people tie the worthiness of an idea to the physical age of the person proposing the idea. (I've been waiting my whole damn life to take advantage of this freaky little weakness of most humans; now that I'm over 35, it's finally starting to happen. Suckers! Er, I mean...valued investors!) Even though I've been pulling off cool little unusual projects for decades now, this arts center will be the first one that will actually pay my bills by doing so, actually bring me legitimate power in the artistic community, actually get hundreds of thousands of dollars directly into the hands of Chicago-area artists.

And that's really the biggest irony of it all - that ultimately, putting this center together is really not that fundamentally different than the student-run arts center I started in college, even though the annual budget for that center was maybe $2,000 and the one for the new center is almost half a million. I had confidence that I could pull off that first project, even when most of the people around me were laughing at me for doing so, and that one ended up being an insanely bigger success than almost anyone (besides me) had even imagined. I find myself going into this new arts project with the same kind of quiet, unshakable belief in the project itself, and in its ability to naturally become a cult success, if I can just convince some people with money to get it off the ground to begin with. I take all this as the good sign I know it is; and ultimately, I take it all as the sign that my Transition Year is finally coming to a close.

So why is it that, even a half-hour into the first episode, I knew that Rock Star: INXS is bound to become THE big cult television hit of the summer? Well, let's start with the fact that the producers have done something no one else in the history of music-based reality television has ever pulled off - they're actually starting with a huge giant group of incredibly-qualified musicians. I mean, seriously, of the 15 people who competed in the first round last night, I could seriously see 13 of them being perfect choices to win the contest (which, for those who don't know, is to become the new lead singer of waning '90s superband INXS).

Now add the fact that the judges aren't just a bunch of industry stringers who have no personal stake in the outcome - no, the judges are of course the members of INXS, and the person they ultimately end up choosing will directly have the power to buy them all new mansions, or the power to force them all onto yet another humiliating reality television show just a couple of years from now. And the band members realize this, and it's obvious that they're going to base their judgements on much more interesting criteria than those simpering industry prison-bitches on American Idol and other such fluff. For example, the three people last night who most developed the chance of getting voted off were the three who most deserved to get voted off - a poser who acted ridiculous on stage, a girl so nervous she forgot some of the lyrics, and this hippie girl who's really the only one of the 15 who should've never been invited in the first place. (Unsurprisingly, she was the one eventually picked to go home.) It's become clear, even from the first epsiode, that these contestants have quite a complex struggle ahead of them - not only who can warble some Mariah Carey bullshit refrain the longest without passing out, but who can realistically move tickets, who can get through half a world tour without becoming a heroin addict, etc.

And now add Dave Navarro! Man, whoever the executive was who convinced Navarro to be on this show should immediately get a raise and a promotion - are you listening to me, CBS? As the official "contestant advocate" of Rock Star, Navarro is going to be in what I think is a very interesting position in future episodes - the guy who listens to all the shit INXS talks about contestants, and then has to step in and get those contestants to stop doing the shit that INXS keeps complaining about. And this is something else that I think is going to make Rock Star a lot different and better than something like American Idol - in this case, the judges themselves have a lot to gain by the contestants becoming better with each week, and will actually be going in and actively helping these contestants become better. And that's something that I think will be really interesting to watch develop - to watch these talented but raw lead singers metamorph into legitimate stadium-level rock stars over the course of the summer.

Anyway, like I said, I'm addicted - and you will be soon too, if you're not careful. New episode tonight! New episode tomorrow night too! Watch out - the onslaught is about to begin!